Sometimes a danger is so close, the appalling size of the disaster so apparent, that the only thing to do is what everyone else is doing, keeping a steady eyes-front. Once you look sideways, once you look around, once you let your imagination out, you know you might lose your head. Clearly the thing to do is to get yourself into a certain definite frame of mind and keep it at all costs, even if it makes you slightly stupid.
For example, the frame of mind which says that environmentalists are all fear-mongers and cunning, Godless radicals, and that global warming is a myth. That the energy crisis and water shortage crisis is just so much radical nonsense.
To invoke Pascal again, "Opinion is the queen of the world."
But there is a difference between popular opinion - common sense- and public opinion.
There are many examples in history, and not the least in the history of democracies, when public opinion and popular opinion are not only different but often diverge.
This may happen when some people become aware of the seeming hopelessness of the situation, the cluelessness of not looking around at a developing catastrophe.
The tone changes when enough people refuse to continue insisting,"this will never come" or "this too will pass."
When people realize that a very big effort will be required, and so will the courage to insist on it.